Peter Bearman

Who is Peter Bearman?

Peter Shawn Bearman is an American sociologist. He is Jonathan Cole Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and the founding director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy.

He received his B.A. in sociology from Brown University in 1978 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. He has been visiting professor at the University of Genoa, Italy, the University of Munich and was formerly Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Lecturer, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University.

Bearman, along with J. Richard Udry, designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, currently the only nationally-representative study of adolescent sexuality in the United States, which has yielded over a thousand published research articles.

From these data, Bearman has published seminal articles on the sexual network, virginity pledges, same sex attraction, and adolescent suicidality. He is widely credited with bringing social network analysis methods to the demographic and population research community. He also introduced social network approaches to social sequence analysis through the concept of narrative networks. Bearman currently directs the Robert Wood Johnson Program in population health at Columbia University. He has received major grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the American Legacy Foundation, the Office of Population Affairs National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and the Rockefeller Foundation, totaling over $2,000,000 .